Drew Dillhunt

Drew Dillhunt is author of the chapbook 3,068,518 (Mudlark, No. 39, 2010). His writing has appeared in Eclectica, Hummingbird, Tarpaulin Sky, and VOLT. His manuscript, Materials Science, was selected as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He’s released two albums of songs, including one with the band Fighting Shy.

The scopophilic selfie in the écriture transféminine of Juliana Huxtable's 'Mucous in my Pineal Gland — OR Universal croptops for all the self-cannonized saints of becoming, a screen4screen tribute

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters. Laura Jaramillo asserts that ASMR videos recreate a sensory and sensual materiality lost to the digital work-a-day world.

Juliana Huxtable’s new book kneels to the internet’s largesse, struggles with it like a mother. Inside this struggle: the birth of her sexuality and the body horror of femininity with its projection planes and infinite play. Also, dysphoria, blackness, fetish, queer sex. She memorializes the internet — that two-way gazing machine, the ultimate screen, constituting and constitutive of self, Self, Selfie — in loud clanking blue letters.

Thanks to Erik Redling and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek for organizing Beyond Metrical Prosody: New Rhythms in US and German (Post-) Modern Poetry at Freie Universitat in Berlin. The lively discussion underlined the value of this German/American exchange. I was grateful to learn more about the poetry and short lives of Rolf Dieter Brinkman (1940–1975), as presented by Jan Röhnert, and Rainer Maria Gerhardt (1927–1954), presented by Agnes C. Müller. Brinkman translated O’Hara and Berrigan. Olson and Creeley wrote poems for Gerhardt (recordings on PennSound), the editor of FRAGMENTE, a prescient magazine that included them both: MP3 — Olson reading “To Gerhardt, There, Among Europe’s Things …” in Berlin in 1966 and MP3: Creeley’s 1956 reading of “For Rainer Gerhardt.”

[N.B. To which she adds, in correspondence: “The elephant is a non-predatory mammal, a sensate being. The poem intersects body and spirit — elephant desire, with the function of marketing, production, distribution and exchange of elephant and rhino body parts by human predators.”]